Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study

By Robert Bagg and Mary Bagg

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) is part of a notable literary cohort, American poets who came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Wilbur's verse is esteemed for its fluency, wit, and optimism; his ingeniously rhymed translations of French drama by Molière, Racine, and Corneille remain the most often staged in the English-speaking world; his essays possess a scope and acumen equal to the era's best criticism. This biography examines the philosophical and visionary depth of his world-renowned poetry and traces achievements spanning seventy years, from political editorials about World War II to war poems written during his service to his theatrical career, including a contentious collaboration with Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman.

Wilbur's life has been mistakenly seen as blessed, lacking the drama of his troubled contemporaries. Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur corrects that view and explores how Wilbur's perceived "normality" both enhanced and limited his achievement. The authors augment the life story with details gleaned from access to his unpublished journals, family archives, candid interviews they conducted with Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, and his correspondence with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, John Malcolm Brinnin, James Merrill, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781613764589

Book preview

Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur

Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur

A Biographical Study

Robert Bagg and Mary Bagg

University of Massachusetts Press

Amherst and Boston

Copyright © 2017 by University of Massachusetts Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover art: Richard Wilbur, c. 1947. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of Richard Wilbur.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library

Excerpts from Collected Poems, 1943–2004 by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. A Measuring Worm, Anterooms, and The House from Anterooms: New Poems and Translations by Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2010 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Writings of Elizabeth Bishop copyright © 2008 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Robert Lowell letters copyright © by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Compilation copyright © 2008 by Thomas J. Travisano. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpts from Racine Phaedra: A Verse Translation by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1960, 1961 by Robert Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Excerpts from unpublished letters written by Elizabeth Bishop to Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2017 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate.

Excerpts from unpublished letters written by Robert Lowell to Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 2017 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Robert Lowell Estate.

Excerpts from Richard Wilbur: The Art of Poetry, No. 22, interview by Helen McCloy Ellison, Ellesa Clay High, and Peter A. Stitt, originally published in The Paris Review, Issue 72, Winter 1977. Copyright © by The Paris Review, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

Excerpts from unpublished letters written by Lillian Hellman to Richard Wilbur. Nonexclusive rights, by permission of the Creative Artists Agency.

To the memory of Charlee Wilbur (1922–2007)

Contents

Prologue

1. Childhood in North Caldwell, New Jersey

Back where safety was

2. Amherst College

NOW THAT WE ARE IN IT

3. World War II, Stateside and in Italy

War poetry shd. deal with the one and the many

4. World War II in France, Germany, and England

OBOE VICTOR EASY ROGER

5. Religion and Wilbur’s War Poems

I weary of the confidence of God

6. The Cambridge Years

A young poet of promise

7. Claiming Molière for His Own Native Tongue

In short, trust the words

8. Prix de Rome

The morning air is all awash with angels

9. Candide and Other Broadway Misadventures

Glitter and be gay

10. In the Circle with Lowell, Bishop, and Jarrell

I should not be conveying competitiveness

11. Keeping a Difficult Balance

The time one spends teaching could be spent writing

12. Overstressed and Overmedicated

No stranger to what is dark in life

13. Key West Winters

Isaiah’s holy mountain

14. Life without Charlee

Night after night, my love, I put to sea

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur

Prologue

Richard Wilbur published his first book of poems, The Beautiful Changes, in 1947. He was twenty-six years old. Reviewing the book for the New Yorker, the American poet Louise Bogan, who was also an acute critic, concluded with a prediction. Let us watch Richard Wilbur, she wrote. He is composed of valid ingredients.¹ Not quite ten years later, Wilbur won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. Unlike the Nobel Prize winners, who receive a rousing phone call from Stockholm in the middle of the night, Wilbur did not hear the good news firsthand.

On the day of the announcement, May 6, 1957, Wilbur’s duties as an associate professor at Wellesley College included a welcome assignment. Marianne Moore, the grand dame of American poetry and a friend of Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, was to read her poems that evening on campus. Wilbur would introduce her, and that afternoon he had written out and polished his remarks.

Moore and Wilbur had already developed both affection and respect for each other. In 1948, for instance, Wilbur had sent Moore a drawing of a swan reflected in a lake, which he thought was relevant to her poem See in the Midst of Fair Leaves. He felt bold enough to include his image of the double swan, along with his perception of how it related to her poem, because he had read somewhere that she liked to accompany her poems with small drawings.² Moore responded kindly that the swan intensified and enhanced her poem, more than she thought the poem deserved.³

Moore’s reading at Wellesley was scheduled for seven o’clock. John Malcolm Brinnin, a poet, teacher, and critic who had become a close friend during Wilbur’s post–World War II graduate-school and teaching years at Harvard, arrived to pick up Wilbur’s wife, Charlee, at the couple’s home in South Lincoln, Massachusetts, and drive her to the reading. In his diary he recorded what happened next:

Downstairs, waiting for Charlee to finish dressing upstairs, I flip on the radio. It’s Pulitzer Prize day—the award goes to Richard Wilbur. . . . I yell up, Charlee hurries down; we fall in to an embrace and do a little dance around the coffee table. Later, as we are driving toward the campus, she says, "You tell him."

I don’t think I should—wouldn’t he be happier hearing it from you? [I say].

No—you tell him, I want you to, [she says].

As we enter the lecture hall, Dick is just approaching the podium to announce Marianne Moore. Charlee and I find seats together and somehow induce ourselves to pay attention. The reading is brief, interspersed with (calculated?) ramblings that always end, or seem to end, bull’s-eye on targets no one had supposed were even there. When it’s over, I start down the steps at the side of the auditorium and Dick starts up the steps. I shake his hand as hard as I can and simply nod. [He asks,] Do you mean it? Without saying a word, I nod again, and Charlee breaks through to confirm it.

To celebrate we head for a steak house on Route 9, drink to the fates, the world, the weather, the day we met. Back on the campus about nine, we find Marianne in the sunroom of a faculty apartment where a welter of Wellesley girls has gathered at her feet. Her tricorne is firmly on her head and her stockings are grey.⁴

The Wilburs went home, and Brinnin headed back to his apartment in Cambridge. Close to midnight, as Brinnin reports, using details he learned the next day, Wilbur received a telegram: YOUR BEAUTIFUL POEMS WILL LIVE FOREVER. JOHN BERRYMAN. Wilbur, writes Brinnin, went to bed without suspecting that Berryman intended the hyperbole in his telegram as sarcasm.⁵ Not only had the Pulitzer committee just passed over Berryman’s Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in favor of Wilbur’s Things of This World, but just two months earlier the National Book Award committee had also bestowed its annual prize on Wilbur. Berryman was not a gracious loser.

The next day, Wilbur sent Berryman a note expressing his gratitude for the telegram. Some weeks later—regretting the ill will he had intended and anticipating Wilbur’s ire—Berryman sent back a long, abashed, ranting apology he’d begun to write before he’d even read what Wilbur had to say. That letter, quoted in chapter 10, exemplifies the charged and tense atmosphere of the poetry world in the mid-twentieth century, a small world in which Wilbur was fully immersed.

Berryman’s rant represented his painful and dreadful competitive spirit, as Wilbur described it, one even more intense than Robert Lowell’s or Theodore Roethke’s.⁶ Berryman would eventually receive universal and lasting praise for Mistress Bradstreet—now widely recognized as the finest long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland—and in 1965 he won his Pulitzer for 77 Dream Songs. (In 1969 Berryman’s His Toy, His Dream, His Rest won both the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize for poetry.) His anguished response to Wilbur’s first Pulitzer contrasts with Lowell’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s silence. By 1957 both had already received their Pulitzers (Lowell in 1947, Bishop in 1956). Neither formally wrote to congratulate Wilbur, nor did they write to each other about his success that year.⁷

For Wilbur, sweeping the major poetry prizes of 1957 improved his chances for earning tenure at Wesleyan University, where he began to teach in the following fall. As the father of three (soon to be four) children, he was grateful for the position and the prizes. Yet he has said that prizes don’t make a difference to a serious poet who is devoted to writing, and he downplays winning them when he does—a modest attitude that he seems to have inherited from his father. I don’t remember my father saying a bragging thing, Wilbur told us in 2007, and he was the sort of person who is good at everything he does.⁸

Born in 1921, Wilbur became a member of what Tom Brokaw has named the Greatest Generation. He served in World War II as a cryptographer with the 36th Texas Division, which joined the invasion on the Anzio beachhead on May 15, 1943, and entered Rome on June 5, 1944, the day when Mark Clark’s Fifth Army captured the city. The 36th engaged in combat for longer than any other division did during the European campaign. After the war, Wilbur returned to civilian life to join a generation of formidable poetic peers—the most accomplished group since the heyday of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens—including Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, and Roethke as well as Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, Karl Shapiro, and Delmore Schwartz.

Wilbur has been prolific, publishing ten volumes of poetry, four books for children of all ages, and fifteen translations of widely performed plays by Molière, Jean Racine, and Pierre Corneille. His theatrical interests and talents, however, reach beyond the classical French plays he has rendered into English. He collaborated with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein on the Broadway production of Candide, a project that was both rewarding and frustrating. Also, in his two books of literary essays (which follow the American school of practical and appreciative criticism rather than the more pontifical criticism of, for instance, Eliot), he provides a counterpoint to the New Critical and close-reading approaches in vogue during the mid-twentieth century. Throughout this book, we quote excerpts from those essays to illuminate how he has applied his critical practice to composing his own poetry.

In addition to the two Pulitzers and the National Book Award, Wilbur has earned every major American literary accolade, including election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 1987–88, and two Bollingen prizes—one for poetry, one for translation.⁹ The critic David Orr, who has called Wilbur A Grand Old Man of American Poetry, praises Anterooms (2010), Wilbur’s slender volume of recent poems, in part because it asks something slightly unusual from the contemporary reader. It asks us to value poetry that is happy to be read as solid and static, rather than unstable and in flux.¹⁰

In response to a few influential critics, who over the years have been less impressed by Wilbur’s body of work or have failed to respond to or even grant its philosophical, visionary, and religious depth, Dana Gioia described his poetic effort as an ironic achievement. Wilbur excels, Gioia says, at precisely those literary forms that many contemporary critics undervalue, those being metrical [and stanzaic] poetry, verse translation, comic verse, song lyrics, and perhaps foremost among these unfashionable but extraordinary accomplishments, religious poetry.¹¹

Certain critics, while acknowledging Wilbur’s wit, metaphoric élan, and formal resourcefulness, find his work merely accomplished or pleasing or elegant. Yet others have seen, within that elegance, a fierce intellectual energy. The qualities that various critics have identified as Wilbur’s attributes—his ingredients, as Bogan called them—have evoked a striking diversity in the literary profession’s evaluation of his achievements.

Bruce Michelson, for instance, has called Wilbur’s work mannered, amiable, and safe, whereas Hecht has seen it as chilling, unfeigned, and kinetic (the latter quality inspired by Wilbur’s study of Edgar Degas). Wilbur possesses, according to Hecht, a philosophical bent and a religious temper, which are by no means the same thing, but which here consort comfortably together. William Logan has called Wilbur clever as a cat, coolly detached, and complacent, though honorable. Joseph Bennett has deemed his poetry durable; to John Ciardi, it is calm and melodic. Leslie Fiedler, writing in 1964, assessed Wilbur at the start of an era in which to cut loose and challenge authority was applauded: There is no personal source anywhere, as there is no passion and no insanity; the insistent ‘I,’ the asserting of sex, and the flaunting of madness apparently considered in equally bad taste.¹² Wilbur faced the challenge raised by Fiedler’s implication—that there’s something wrong with being sensible and restrained (for either the poet or the poetry) or something suspect in appearing to be normal—at a time when many of his peers, suffering from mental illnesses and suicidal depression, focused their poetry on angst and despair. He never felt an impulse to write confessional poetry; he sensed that the genre was undignified for a man who believes that complaining, by its nature, is a weakness.

Throughout this book, we examine how Wilbur has remained true to his own poetic identity, refusing to develop fashionable, and usually transitory, styles. Yet in his recent collection Anterooms, he has taken a different tack: more than half of the poems he has composed speak in the first person, and in them he examines his life more directly, with grace and dignity, as he contemplates its end. As Orr notes, remaining solid and not in flux is especially tricky if you’re writing about death, as Wilbur is in the strongest poems here.¹³

In this biography we invite readers to watch Wilbur’s life unfold, in chapters both chronological and thematic, as we look ahead to (or reflect upon) how certain events and attitudes surface in his work. We begin with the early influences and the often-solitary interests of his childhood, particularly his fascination with codes, drawing, and spontaneous pranks that disconcerted adults. He attended Amherst College at a time when the country was debating and then preparing to enter World War II. His own entry into the military, which tested his pacifist principles and his assumption that free speech was sacred even during a war, began with a nearly disastrous accusation of disloyalty to his country. But a moment of good fortune restored him to active duty and the code work he was trained to do. His experiences during the European campaign had a life-changing impact on his future as they moved him to write his first serious poems.

Postwar, at Harvard, a Junior Fellowship liberated Wilbur from pursuing a purely scholarly career and allowed him to travel to Paris and Rome. Each city provided subjects, attitudes, and inspiration for his writing. During the Vietnam era his antiwar beliefs and activism conflicted with his veteran’s sense of duty to the nation, which he believed required his sons to accept the draft.

Contrary to the perception of fans and the general public, Wilbur’s personal life was not free from emotional hardship, especially when his and Charlee’s fourth child, Aaron, was diagnosed as autistic in the early 1960s. While at the Camargo Institute in the mid-1980s, as mounting mental stress affected both Wilbur and Charlee, they became addicted to Valium and struggled with the aftereffects for years. Charlee’s physical health became increasingly fragile in the early 2000s, thus preventing the Wilburs from returning to their cherished winter getaway in Key West. Her death in 2007 left Wilbur without the companionship and literary partnership that had sustained him for sixty-five years. Yet his resilience and faith allowed him to produce more French translations, this time of Corneille, and the acclaimed poems of Anterooms.

We supplement our discussions of Wilbur’s poetic oeuvre with critical analyses by others and with excerpts from his published prose and translations for the theater. We quote passages from interviews we conducted with Wilbur between 2005 and 2015 and with Charlee from 2005 until her death. In unpublished journals, Wilbur has consistently recorded his thoughts on everything from philosophy to religion to literature as well as on his ambitions and fears, and he has granted us permission to use this material.

In May 1973, Wilbur was two years away from retirement at Wesleyan; immediately thereafter he would become a writer in residence at Smith College. The following passage from his journal, written during that month, shows him assessing his present state of mind. At the time he was gearing up to plant his garden in Cummington, Massachusetts, and anticipating getting back to work on the The Mind-Reader, a poem that occupied him for nearly twenty years. Written amid these transitions, the passage perfectly captures his lifelong spirit and sense of purpose:

I have noticed that I am happiest when taken out of myself, either by the desire to say or write or do something better than my ordinary lumpish self could do it, or by going out to others in aid or sympathy. No doubt I am conditioned to feel so by such religious training as has truly rubbed off on me, and by my society’s high estimation of work and achievement.¹⁴

1

Childhood in North Caldwell, New Jersey

Back where safety was

Growing up in North Caldwell in what amounted to a little British colony, it was understood that anything British was better than anything American, at least contemporaneously. Of course we felt that George Washington was better than George III.

—Richard Wilbur, interview by the authors, April 4, 2006

A memory from childhood opens each of the three stanzas of This Pleasing Anxious Being, a poem that Richard Wilbur wrote at the age of seventy-seven. In each stanza Wilbur pauses for a moment in the remembered scene and then feels time pulsing him forward, inevitably toward death. As he both presents his life and invites us to explore it through the poem, he quietly asserts his belief that the soul is immortal.

Wilbur renders the poem’s autobiographical facts in vivid detail, often with references to photography and painting, artistic genres that can influence our memories by capturing them and lifting them from their contexts. In the first stanza, for instance, he evokes the chiaroscuro technique in Georges de La Tour’s painting The Nativity, freezing his family (but only for a moment) in a serene but dramatically lit tableau—the dining room on an evening in the mid-1920s:

In no time you are back where safety was,

Spying upon the lambent table where

Good family faces drink the candlelight

As in a manger scene by de La Tour.

Father has finished carving at the sideboard

And Mother’s hand has touched a little bell,

So that, beside her chair, Roberta looms

With serving bowls of yams and succotash.

When will they speak, or stir? They wait for you

To recollect that, while it lived, the past

Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.

The muffled clash of silverware begins,

With ghosts of gesture, with a laugh retrieved,

And the warm, edgy voices you would hear:

Rest for a moment in that resonance.

But see your small feet kicking under the table,

Fiercely impatient to be off and play.¹

British Civility and Southern Manners

How the family came to be in that room—how Wilbur came to grow up in a little British colony in a small American town—involved a bit of serendipity.² In 1923, when he was two, his father, Lawrence Lazear Wilbur (1893–1976), met a British expatriate named Joshua Dickinson Armitage on a golf course in northern New Jersey. The men played their round with an Englishman named Stanley Pigeon, a mutual acquaintance. Pigeon, who spent time aboard a naval training ship with the British poet John Masefield when both were young and whose extraordinary career doing this and that included stints as a cowboy and an amateur violinist, had met Lawrence Wilbur while they were both enrolled at the Art Students League in New York.³

Armitage took a shine to Lawrence and offered him and his family, for minimal rent, residence in a handsome pre-Revolutionary-era stone house on Greenbrook Road, part of an otherwise British-style estate that Armitage was building for himself on 450 acres. As Wilbur explained in 2006, My father and mother, who were always innocent people and willing to be influenced, took him up on it rather quickly.⁴ Across the road, on property purchased from Armitage, lived Pigeon and his wife Helen.

Wilbur’s father had left his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, at age seventeen to study at the Art Students League, and he eventually became a freelance commercial artist. Though he never received the public recognition that J. C. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, and Howard Chandler Christy enjoyed, he was just as sought after by ad agencies and lithographic companies. His poster commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Cross brought fame to Marie Bard, his model for the nurse; her image appeared on a two-cent U.S. postage stamp in 1931.⁵ By midcareer, Lawrence was receiving commissions for billboard-sized portraits of each year’s Miss Rheingold pageant winner, and his illustrations were frequently featured on Saturday Evening Post and Colliers covers.⁶ As technical advances in photography diminished the work available for magazine illustrators, he began focusing on portraits and landscape painting, glad to escape the four-color limitations of lithography to experiment with casein and watercolor.

Armitage was originally a Yorkshireman. Born circa 1866, he had immigrated to Boston’s Beacon Hill from Manchester, England, bringing along his wife and a servant. On the 1890 U.S. Census he listed his occupation as a fabric designer. He held the patent for oilcloth and subsequently owned successful textile and paint-manufacturing operations in Newark, New Jersey, and in New England. By the early 1920s, Armitage, now a widower, was populating his North Caldwell farm with a community of British relatives, friends, and business associates, including the Nashes (his niece and her florist husband), a lawyer named Habberton, and other kindred spirits.

Armitage maintained that he had left England because of its landed gentry’s disdain for men who made their fortunes in trade. That may have been the only upper-class prejudice he rejected, for he retained the British aristocracy’s Tory politics, which he naturalized into reflexive, anti-Roosevelt republicanism. Nonetheless, the people who lived in their various separate dwellings on the estate were, in Wilbur’s words, decent, attractive, civilized, kind, and gay, and living there suited his open-minded parents. Armitage, known as Uncle, presided over his domain as if he had been born to the manor he had created, and young Dick Wilbur came to believe that if the British did it, it was better.⁷

The Armitage estate was a multifaceted and instructive environment in which to grow up, and it offered Wilbur his first glimpse of adult society. The grown-ups organized cocktail parties and dinners, played bridge, lawn-bowled, and competed at tennis, although Uncle himself never appeared on the court. Wilbur describes that court, which was across the dirt road from the Wilbur house, as rather strange.

[Armitage had] laid it out in the wrong direction so that the sun was always in someone’s eyes. It was surrounded by Japanese honeysuckle which flourished there and was very deep so that every ball that went over the fence took a lot of cussing to retrieve. I’ve never seen a surface like that since. It was fine gravel, so that one had to drag and roll between sets; it became very dug up by people’s sliding on it. But nevertheless it was not a bad court, and it was a very important center of the farm for everybody involved.⁸

On Sundays Wilbur attended church and, in season, played tennis. The flavor of both was remarkably similar, he remembers. The rules for behavior [on the court] were very strict, and it was a very high-minded sort of game. His early religious education, however, was somewhat less intense.

We did say grace at dinnertime. I don’t think we did for lunch, and it was never a long one, . . . probably a brisk saying of For what we are about to receive let us be thankful. My father would never have been the one to say the grace. He’d been raised in a Presbyterian church, but not much raised. He didn’t care for the piety. He’d go to an Episcopal church down in Montclair sometimes at my mother’s insistence, and he’d come away saying, Luke White [the pastor] seemed to talk sense this morning. He wanted people to talk sense and therefore had a resistance to a lot of religious talk. On some Sundays when my family was otherwise occupied I was taken by the head gardener of the farm to a nearby Baptist Sunday school, where we sang marvelous, rousing hymns and were given little tracts illustrated in terrible colors.⁹

The social spirit on the farm was cordial, inclusive, and respectful, though there were disruptions. One evening during the crisis that surrounded the abdication of King Edward VIII, Armitage declared that thrice-married Wallis Simpson was little better than a common whore. Fuming at his insult, Mrs. Habberton shot out of her chair. Declaring, Uncle, I cannot stay at this table any longer, she abruptly left the room. The Nashes, who took a romantic view of Edward and Wallis, were distraught as well. The issue caused a real division and broke up the universal admiration of England held by most on the farm.¹⁰

But civility returned and prevailed, especially when Armitage’s celebrity friends visited. Uncle arranged one afternoon for Wilbur’s mother, Helen, to invite Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea-company and America’s Cup magnate, to her home for some late afternoon refreshment. On bidding goodbye he complimented her, saying she was as charming as an English hostess. She replied, And you, sir, have the manners of a southern gentleman.¹¹

Helen Ruth Purdy Wilbur (1892–1981) was the daughter of a prominent Baltimore newspaperman, Clarence Melvyn Purdy, who worked for most of his career at the Baltimore Sun, moving through its ranks to become the city editor. Helen often spoke about her childhood memories of H. L. Mencken, one of the paper’s eminent contributors. When he came to dinner, his laughter began at the door and never stopped until he left.¹² Clarence Purdy, whom everyone at the paper fondly called Pop, took his grandson Dick to the Sun offices to shake hands with Mencken and the columnist Frank Kent as well as with the cartoonists Edmund Duffy and Richard Q. Yardley. The experience influenced Wilbur’s involvement with his school newspapers and led him to consider becoming a journalist.

Helen Wilbur was lively, literate but not learned, and a perfectionist. She was also an expert whistler who encouraged her eldest son’s eclectic enthusiasms, from cartooning to shortwave radio. Nonetheless, her driven nature backfired periodically. When Dick and his brother Lawrie were very young, she was sidelined by exhaustion after a miscarriage. Wilbur’s wife, Charlee, who got to know her in-laws intimately (she lived with them while her husband was in the army during World War II), described Helen as strong of will but not of body . . . and it turned out later that she had blood sugar problems with attendant fatigue. Charlee also sensed that the cloistered ambience of the farm, where the Wilburs lived in the midst of people who had more money than they did, exacerbated Helen’s aspiring social desires and compounded the stress of running the household.¹³

Tears, a poem that Wilbur never included in any of his books, suggests that his own sense of the animosity among social classes remained acute at least into his late twenties. The poem begins with a sarcastic description of the rich, with all the burdens their possessions and privilege entail: The straight old men with scalloped skulls who bear / The Atlas weight of eighty years of ease. In the last stanza, after categorizing them as ignorant, insatiable, and unappreciative, the poet can only hope they get to experience what they’ve missed:

Pale porters of our wealth, who may not see

The least magnificence with grateful eye,

O takers of our ease, sad spenders whom

The world can tease but never satisfy,

I wish you other lives beyond the tomb,

Of hunger, loss and sweet anxiety.¹⁴

Wilbur recalled reading Tears in North Caldwell at a lawn party hosted by Helen Pigeon in 1948, about a year after his first book drew critical acclaim. The poem failed to upset his parents’ moneyed neighbors or the friends and Armitage family members who lived on the estate in various rental or sale arrangements. They seemed to be telling themselves (with some truth, according to Wilbur) that they weren’t that kind of rich while at the same time commenting to others, Isn’t that Wilbur boy a wonder?¹⁵

Richard Wilbur and his mother, Helen Purdy Wilbur, winter 1922. Courtesy of Richard Wilbur.

The Wilbur’s eighteenth-century stone house, venerable enough to be counted among those where George Washington had spent a night, had small rooms by 1920s standards. Before Uncle’s tenure, in the days when the estate was primarily a farm, a large kitchen had been added in the rear to feed the hands. The Wilbur family employed live-in household servants during the boys’ childhood but never more than one at a time, so the accommodations were ideal.

One black servant made a lasting impression on Wilbur. Raymond was a pretty good cook, and when not cooking would whip on a cap and become chauffeur, and then appear in another rig as a butler. I remember him with delight, he said. He had an amorous setback at one time. A new [child’s model] typewriter had been given me and on it he typed, for the sake of a ‘true confessions’ magazine, I suppose, a story called ‘My Stolen Love’ [that] was never published. But he ruined my typewriter in the process.¹⁶

Helen’s upbringing in Baltimore, a city with a strict black-white dividing line, complicated to some degree the Wilbur family’s easy relationship with their black servants. Once, when Helen and Lawrence were away, the servants on the farm gave an unauthorized party. During the gathering someone showed Dick how to pare an apple so that the peel would fall away in an unbroken, spiraling strip. When he demonstrated this trick to his mother, she responded with suspicion about the circumstances rather than showing appreciation for her son’s dexterity with a knife. Although she tried hard not to offend or show prejudice, and she genuinely liked the people whom she and Lawrence employed, she occasionally slipped into old southern ways. For instance, when calling attention to Dick’s table manners, she once commanded him to eat like a white man. As Wilbur recalled the scene, Roberta, the maid who looms over the table in This Pleasing Anxious Being, was dishing out vegetables in that real-life moment. Everyone else winced, but Roberta, however she felt inside, remained outwardly cheerful.¹⁷

To express his views about social class difference, Wilbur wrote a number of poems based on observed or imagined scenes that were peopled by servants or the estate’s hired hands rather than by its upper-class residents. In A Summer Morning, for instance (from his 1961 collection Advice to a Prophet), he describes two servants relishing order and beauty both in the household and the natural world while their young masters, who had partied too hard the previous night, sleep past breakfast. As the cook fries herself an egg and makes the coffee, she finds satisfaction in jelly jars lined up on the shelf, songs of the thrush and catbird in the terraced gardens, and the snip of the gardener’s shears. The gardener, diligently at work before the heat of day, surveys the estate and receives the morning. Making a distinction in the poem between what the servants satisfyingly possess and what the masters, in their oblivion, own, Wilbur echoes a judgment about the meaning of wealth similar to the one he made in Tears.

Thinking of happiness, I think of that

Although Armitage’s emigration from Manchester was driven by his resentment of the landed gentry, Wilbur surmised that Uncle wanted to set up as a country squire. He had the money at least initially to do so . . . [but] less money as time went on. The scale of the farm was such that it can’t ever have been profitable. The whole thing was charming, professional—he had good employees—but uneconomic, with saddle horses, milk cows, a bull, chickens, pigs, orchards, extensive vegetable and flower gardens, and hayfields.¹⁸

The crew of farmers and gardeners necessary to run the farm allowed young Dick and Lawrie to interfere in, or at least observe, all their operations. Wilbur recalled:

I was involved in everything, tolerated as a child by the hands and allowed to participate in all sorts of exciting things like the spraying of the orchards and the killing of the pigs. I didn’t kill a pig, but I was there when they were killed. They make an awful noise. I think if I was older I would have found some of this horrifying. But I found it fascinating as a child. Chopping off chickens’ heads seemed the normal thing, and I thought it was funny when a chicken was decapitated and the body thrown out the window to run around for a while. . . . There was a lot of fun about it. I was allowed to ride in the hay wagon and bring the hay into the barn, and help shoot the silage up into the tower. Of course a farm like that is wonderful for playing games in, although Lawrie and I were repeatedly asked not to climb on the tiled roofs.¹⁹

Wilbur seemed to matter-of-factly accept death among the barnyard animals, but the loss of his beloved dog triggered childhood responses of fear, grief, and guilt. The collie, named Brownie, was struck by a car and dragged by the driver into a clump of pine trees and honeysuckle vine at the edge of the farm’s tennis court. In The Pardon, published in Ceremony (1950), the adult narrator recalls how the dog lay dead for five days, long enough for the odor of decay to mix with the heavy-sweet scent of the honeysuckle; the ten-year-old boy, transfixed, could only watch while his father dug a hole and buried the dog. This failure of nerve inspires a dream in which the speaker asks Brownie, alive and emerging from the grass in a haze of flies, for forgiveness. The moment, whether desired or real, as the narrator explains, provides closure combined with hope that the past is never past redeeming.

Exposure to the farm’s flora and fauna grounded Wilbur’s imagination in the natural world—not the often vague and distant landscape that Wordsworth spiritualizes but one precisely and intimately observed with a budding naturalist’s informed eye and exact vocabulary. Wilbur’s early enthusiasm for the world of the farm moved him to learn from books and observe in meadows, fields, orchards, and streams the life cycles of insects, creatures, and plants, which became the inspiration for the metaphoric structure of many of the poems we discuss in later chapters, notably Water Walker (1945), which uses the caddis fly as a trope, and Mayflies (1999).

Wilbur has been considered a religious poet (at least a third of his published poems are inflected by his Christian belief, an aspect of his work we will revisit) but almost never a visionary poet. When this visionary aspect does appear, it carries readers through a cycle from life to death and beyond. Six poems in Wilbur’s 2004 Collected Poems are set (or open with a scene) on the farm. All of them qualify as visionary, and two warrant mention here: He Was, first published in Ceremony, and Running, from Walking to Sleep (1969).²⁰

The title of He Was runs directly into the first of its eighteen lines, a brown old man with a green thumb. The sounds that the speaker hears come not from the gardener’s mouth but from his tools: the screak of his hoe and the chug, choke, and high madrigal wheeze of a spray cart soaking the orchard’s trees. In the poem’s last lines Wilbur shifts to language seen rather than heard: the voice that the old man expertly cultivated during his working life, with his hands buried in livening clay, now rises among the leaves into the sparrowy air of the orchard.

In He Was, Wilbur not only demonstrates his belief in a benign higher power at work in the world but also, by registering pleasure at seeing a man’s labor come to fruition after his death, celebrates the gardener’s connection to that power. For Wilbur, the gardener’s legacy of flowering trees sends a message as meaningful as (and perhaps more profound than) any rendered by the spoken word. In evermore ambitious poems over the decades he has continued to explore the ways in which the natural and spiritual world reflect one other.

The first section of Running, which is dated 1933 and set in North Caldwell, opens with a recollection of Wilbur’s childhood fondness for games such as prisoner’s base: he describes leaping into the air, bouncing off a hummock-side, and then sprinting across the flats, too young to tire or even to fear tiring. In the second section, set on Patriots’ Day in Wellesley, the speaker is one among many spectators (we fathers and our little sons) watching Boston Marathon runners sweep by as they ascend Heartbreak Hill. In the third and final section, we see the speaker, now pushing fifty, jogging out of the woods bordering his home in Cummington and then slowing to a swagger, ribs aching, as the road turns and sinks toward a pasture in the west. The poem ends after he meets two boys who are throwing rocks and chasing a dog as it yaps and flushes out a pheasant from the tall grass. Imagery in all three sections evokes the movement of humans, flora, and fauna as they ascend toward and then descend from the heavens. (We return to the kinetic quality of Wilbur’s verse in chapter 6.)

Such activity brings to mind Frost’s poem Birches, with its going and coming back to earth as well as its famous line, One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. That poem, which opens as the speaker is observing saplings bent nearly to the ground, is often interpreted as a desire for a temporary escape, through the imaginings of childhood, from the adult world and its rationales. The speaker would prefer to think that the youngsters who swayed through the air on those pliant adolescent trees caused the trunks to bow so low, not Truth . . . / With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm.²¹

But Wilbur has in mind a different aspiration in Running than Frost expresses in Birches, with its longing to dip in and out of the pleasures of boyhood exuberance. In the third section Wilbur reflects on an intrinsic value of life that humans search for and want to cling to, first by acknowledging the near impossibility of possessing or even recognizing it:

What is the thing which men will not surrender?

It is what they have never had, I think,

Or missed in its true season.

The speaker, who clearly identifies with such a metaphysical quest, is thus running, too, in pursuit of something he alone cannot overtake. His answer is to reclaim that joy from childhood—Thinking of happiness, I think of that, as the North Caldwell section concludes—and bestow it as best he can on the future: I make a clean gift of my young running / To the two boys who break into view, the speaker declares in the final Cummington section.

In both Running and He Was, Wilbur’s practice as a visionary poet is grounded not only in the idea of legacy—of spirit invested and reborn—but also in his connection to his surroundings in the natural world. In these poems and others like them, he has emerged on the page (much as he does in public) as a quiet, hopeful, and optimistic man. Compared to many twentieth-century poets who found the road to fame running through the valleys of despair and self-destruction—from Hart Crane and Delmore Schwartz to Lowell, Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath—Wilbur may seem almost suspiciously normal.

Be modest about any little thing

Wilbur has described Joshua Armitage as something of a Maecenas, a patron of the arts whose generous offer of housing had brought the Wilbur family to his estate in 1923.²² In December 1928, perhaps as a Christmas gift to his patron, Lawrence Wilbur created a whimsical watercolor map of the property, which today hangs in Wilbur’s Cummington home. Under a banner with the title A portion of the estate of Mr. J. D. Armitage in North Caldwell, N.J., he painted an unfurled scroll with a key to the map and a disclaimer: A graphic design executed with an eye for depicting a few salient details and interesting truths rather than accurately conforming to the physical facts. The compass arrow points somewhat North, and the main locations, labeled A, B, C, and D, are identified, respectively, as The Orchard, The Meadow, The Deep Tangled Wildwood, and The Old Oaken Bucket, the latter shown hanging from a rope underneath the covered well next to the Wilburs’ stone house. In addition to homes, outbuildings, and farm structures such as a silo and a chicken coop, notable features include a tennis court, a pitch for lawn bowling, and a swimming pool.

Demonstrating a quirky sensibility (one that Dick Wilbur seemed to observe, internalize, and express in his own early sketches and cartoons), Lawrence left the court and the pool empty but, on a painted patch of lawn, added illustrations of figures serving a ball, doing the crawl stroke, and diving. Elsewhere on the map, scattered throughout the woods, meadows, and cultivated fields, he painted disembodied hands that point to figures engaged in activities such as hunting, bird watching, planting, and frolicking.

After living on the estate for several years, Lawrence and Helen bought the stone house. Although Armitage had built a north-lit portrait studio next to the house, Lawrence continued to commute to his studio on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, which he still needed for his commercial work and contacts. For Dick, his father’s urban workplace became a new base from which to investigate and explore. He haunted bookstores and magazine vendors, acquiring and reading much current fiction and a huge range of political journalism, including the Daily Worker and the New Masses. (Curiously, says Wilbur, his family never had a subscription to the New Yorker, but their modest house was filled with stacks of Town and Country and other magazines whose images would inspire scenes and settings for his father’s commercial work.)

Lawrence was utterly devoted to painting, and he found nothing more relaxing after a tiring day at his easel than to sit in a chair turning the pages of art books, all of which became part of Wilbur’s own collection after his father’s death. Art, in practice and as a subject of historical study, pervaded the North Caldwell household. In Wilbur’s writing, its influence is palpable, not only in references to paintings (such the Georges de La Tour work mentioned in This Pleasing Anxious Being) and in ekphrastic poems (such as Wyeth’s Milk Cans) but also in a remarkable essay that Wilbur wrote while he was a graduate student at Harvard, in which he distinguished Degas’s approach to representation from that of his Impressionist contemporaries.

During one of our interviews with Wilbur in 2007, the subject of modesty crept in and out of the conversation. I don’t believe in a modesty gene, he exclaimed. He was talking about the fixed personality traits of the characters in Corneille’s play The Theatre of Illusion, which he was translating at the time.²³ The discussion prompted him to reminisce about his upbringing and then about how his father, facing death, assessed the scope of his own achievement in comparison to his son’s:

I am sure I was encouraged by my parents to be modest about any little thing I’d done, and there were a lot of negative terms for those who were not. . . . I don’t remember my father as saying a bragging thing, and he was the sort of person who is good at everything he does. And he was never daunted on the croquet court or anywhere else. When he was dying my father . . . had a feeling which many dying men must have, that he was going to disappear without a trace. And he said to me during our last conversation, All my paintings are scattered all over the place; you’re lucky, all your stuff is in books. And I said to him, But, Dad, a book can sit on the bookcase untouched for decades, whereas your paintings are up on the walls and people are looking at them and in many cases admiring them. And he agreed, tentatively, Yes, I guess that’s true.²⁴

A seascape painted by Wilbur’s father figures significantly in the second stanza of This Pleasing Anxious Being, which is set on the Maine coast where the family vacationed when Wilbur was a child. He frames the scene within another picture—a photograph of a picnic in progress.

The shadow of whoever took the picture

Reaches like Azrael’s across the sand

Toward grown-ups blithe in black and white, encamped

Where surf behind them floods a rocky cove.

They turn with wincing smiles, shielding their eyes

Against the sunlight and the future’s glare,

Which notes their bathing caps, their quaint maillots,